You Are To Decide.., but Death and Rising Are Through Human Flesh by Walt March, Antony Sturdee, and Claire Glowen

I will start this by saying that from the title of this book, you can’t really figure out what it will be about. That is the case with some books, which is fine, but with this one it is different. Even after reading it I am not really sure what it was about.

I guess there was a main storyline; The main character is a detective. Tragedy strikes his family and others around him. The horror seems to be stemming from this mysterious book that was given to his wife and child. He and his partner Felix team up to try to solve the crimes.

Then there was the poetry that was thrown in the complement the novel. I think this was a good strategy in theory. It helped break up the story in to smaller and easier to read parts rather than having just a plain wall of text. Coming from someone who can lose interest easily if I am not given short chapters or some sort of a break in the chapters, I liked this concept.

The execution, though, I felt was very weak. Many times I was wondering how the poems flowed with the story. Other times I wondered if they were meant to fit at all or if they were just a small thought given to us from the main character. Some of them did fit and flow with the story, and when they did, it was enjoyable.

Then there was the non-poetry, non-main story line that consisted of just the thoughts of the main character on various topics often revolving around religion. When you decide to write on religious topics, it is really either hit or miss. There is rarely a middle ground that the stories fall into and I felt this one was sort of a miss. I didn’t understand how most of it tied in together, and the flow was just not there for me.

The writing in this novel was very, very formal. For me, if I am reading formal writing, I feel like I am reading a text book and it makes it hard to focus on the story line. I found myself getting lost often, but not really wanting to go back and reread the paragraph, page, etc.

The only thing that kept me hanging on until the end was wanting to figure out what the story was behind the mysterious book. Once I got to the end, I felt it was severely lacking and I felt like I didn’t receive a full story.

The concept behind this novel was pretty good, the execution missed the mark though.

2/5 stars. There was mystery to the story, but the thoughts didn't flow together. 

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